Patsy Hutch: Did the man under 24-hour Garda protection plan the Regency attack?

In the course of the Kinahan-Hutch feud, the Kinahan cartel has put the most effort, and money, into killing Patsy Hutch. Above any of its other foes, he has been the cartel’s prime target.

Patsy Hutch’s son, Gary, nine years ago tried to murder cartel leader Daniel Kinahan. The memory of that attack has not faded and even though Gary Hutch has since been himself shot dead, the Kinahans desire for more vengeance is behind the repeated efforts to murder Patsy Hutch in Dublin.

The older brother of Gerard Hutch, Patsy Hutch (62) has almost become a one-man battleground in the feud. However, that particular battle has not been between the Kinahan cartel and Hutch faction. Instead, it has been between the Kinahans and the State.

On one side, the cartel has recruited and activated several execution teams to murder Patsy Hutch, reportedly investing up to €200,000 in some of those teams. On the opposing side, the State has put 24-hour Garda protection in place outside Patsy Hutch’s home in north Dublin city, in a bid to keep him alive.

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But now, following the acquittal of Gerard Hutch (60) at the Special Criminal Court for the murder of David Byrne (34) at the Regency Hotel, north Dublin, in 2016, the State has been left with a very difficult proposition on its hands.

As it continues to extend 24-hour protection every day without exception to Patsy Hutch – there were two Garda cars outside his home when The Irish Times passed several times on Tuesday – the same court that acquitted his younger brother has raised the proposition that it was Patsy Hutch who organised the Regency Hotel attack.

“[A] reasonable possibility arises on the evidence that the Regency was planned by Patsy Hutch and that Gerard Hutch stepped in, as head of the family, to attempt to sort out the aftermath of the Regency, particularly as his own life was at risk,” the Special Criminal Court stated in its judgment delivered on Monday.

In its lengthy judgment at the conclusion of Gerard Hutch’s trial, the Special Criminal Court sets out how Patsy Hutch’s home was searched by gardaí as part of the investigation into the Regency Hotel attack, involving five gunmen – three dressed in mock Garda uniforms and armed with AK47s. The court notes an ACT card – for opening electric gates – for the Buckingham Village complex in central Dublin, used as a base for the Regency conspirators, was found in a jacket at Patsy Hutch’s home. It was the same jacket containing a wallet with Patsy Hutch’s driving licence and the key was in numerical sequence to another key in possession of one of men convicted for his role as a getaway driver in the Regency attack.

The court found, beyond reasonable doubt, that “members of the Hutch family were responsible for the attack at the Regency and the murder of David Byrne”. It set out a number of pieces of evidence it relied on to arrive at that conclusion, many of which related to Patsy Hutch.

This included: Patsy Hutch being involved in the handover to an IRA man of the AK47s used in the Regency attack, two days after the attack; Patsy Hutch possessing those guns before the handover; Patsy Hutch arranging for a room to be booked at the Regency Hotel so it could be used the night before by one of the gunmen, Kevin Murray; and Patsy Hutch and his brother Eddie Hutch being connected to Buckingham Village, from where some of the vehicles, and at least one gunman, departed from for the Regency attack and where the AK47s were stored afterwards.

[ Funeral of Eddie Hutch passes peacefully ]

The court also believed evidence it heard that Patsy Hutch had in early 2016 asked Jonathan Dowdall to reach out to his IRA contacts in the North to help broker a peace deal with the Kinahans. The court pointed to a conversation between Gerard Hutch and Jonathan Dowdall – secretly recorded via a Garda bug as the men drove to the North with the AK47s after the Regency attack – that Gerard Hutch had difficulty accessing the guns. He “had difficulty getting Patsy to get them out of Buckingham Village”.

While the judgment of the court makes for difficult reading for Patsy Hutch, he faces no charges. As a teenager, he was a member of Dublin’s so-called Bugsy Malone gang – specialising in robberies and smash and grabs – along with his brother Gerard in the 1970s. However, he is not a man who has been before the courts for decades.

[ Profile: Who are the Hutches?  ]

While still living under extreme threat from the Kinahan cartel, and now having come into sharp focus in the Special Criminal’s Court ruling, the remarks by the court perhaps matter little to him considering the turbulent events he has been through in recent years.

His son Patrick jnr was wounded in a punishment shooting by Daniel Kinahan in Dublin in 2014. This was part of a settlement between the Kinahan and Hutch families after Patsy Hutch’s other son – one-time Kinahan cartel member Gary Hutch – tried to have Daniel Kinahan shot dead in Spain in 2014 as part of an internal dispute within the cartel. In a bid to settle the dispute, the Hutches paid the Kinahans €200,000 and agreed to present Patrick jnr to be shot in the legs by Daniel Kinahan.

However, while Kinahan did shoot Patrick jnr – in a lock-up in Drumcondra, north Dublin, in 2014 – the Kinahans reneged on the peace deal. Gary Hutch was murdered by the Kinahan cartel in Spain in September 2015, the first killing in the Kinahan-Hutch feud. Patsy’s Hutch’s brother, Eddie Hutch, and nephew Christopher Coakley Hutch were also murdered by the Kinahans as part of the feud.